Facebook will now instantly translate your posts across 44 languages
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On Friday, US-based social media giant Facebook announced the launch of its translation tool which will instantly translate user’s posts in 44 languages based on the reader’s preferences.
In Q1 2016, the company had introduced the ‘multilingual composer’ for page admins. The same feature is now being rolled out for general users.
Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, currently boasts of over 1.5 billion users, many of whom speak languages other than English. “People use Facebook to communicate and share in many different languages. In fact, 50 percent of our community speaks a language other than English, and most people don’t speak each other’s languages. We’re always thinking about ways we can help remove language as a barrier to connecting on Facebook,” read Facebook’s official blog post.
The company will keep a track of individuals location and preferred language to automatically decide the language in which to display the post. “We use several signals to determine the most relevant version of the post to show each viewer, including the language preferences and the locale that people selected for their accounts, as well as the language they most commonly post in,” mentions the post.
By introducing multilingual posts for its billion plus users, Facebook is aiming at eliminating the language barriers across its platform and allowing users to communicate easily with people from other nationalities. “We also plan to use multilingual posts to improve our machine translation training data. By opening this tool to people who speak less common languages, we’ll be able to build better machine translation systems. This will move us closer to our vision of removing language barriers across Facebook,” it adds.
Machine learning is touted as the future of translation services, a segment that’s currently dominated by Google’s Translate service.
Earlier this week, the company also announced that it is tweaking its newsfeed to give priority to ‘friends over brands’.
